Crunch Time?

Now that I have new schedule for my other job, I have more time to work on Cafe Evoke Catering. Over the past week, I have been trying to clean up my office, get things in order, work on our books, and try to get a handle on where we are now, where we need to go, and how we are going to get there. We have an interesting marketing challenge here in Bozeman. We believe in serving Fair Trade Certified Products that are organic whenever possible. We try to use recycled materials for all of our printing needs and environmentally friendly cleaning supplies, etc. In other words, we try to be as green of a business as possible. This type of service "caters" (sorry for that type of pun this early) to a certain crowd. But is this the crowd that will pay to have open coffee bar service as their party? We have had several people tell us our set up looks very "Bozeman Yuppie" (if you live in the Bozeman area, you know what I am talking about). I take that as a good thing, however, because I am excited with how our set-up turned out but how do we reach them? It has become clear that the people that will hang out at our coffeehouse -- when it opens -- are not the same people that will hire our catering services. So how do we reach them? We do have an ad scheduled to be released in the 2007 edition of Montana Bride that comes out this November (ish) which will get our services in front of brides and event planners. I have sent information to several groups of people in town as well but it seems that I have missed that niche group that we need to reach out to. Right now I am working on the following groups of people: 1. HatchFEST 2. 2006 Parade of Homes 3. Bite of Bozeman We feel that these three group -- and a few others -- will give us some exposure to the group of people that will hire us. I have found this to be the biggest challenge so far. I have not spent much time trying to figure out how to tailor our marketing efforts to this catering business and maybe I jumped in to quickly. At this point, we are in crunch time. I feel that we are in a good position but it is time to really go after it and get out of this comfort zone that I feel we have settled in. I will post my plans in the next couple of days and report back on what we have done and where we are going. ...be bold Tagged: cafe evoke, catering, bozeman, montana, coffee, espresso, tea, hatchfest, bite of bozeman